My Bloody AWP (which wasn't bloody after all)

I don't know what the deal was with this year's AWP, but the manic, hectic, grotesque vibe that usually pervades the conference was somehow gone. Maybe we're all feeling luckier, and nicer. Perhaps bad AWP mojo can't survive mile high. At any rate, I'm back in my office after a vile 17-hour trip back (by plane, not stagecoach), and feeling as if I've just had a vacation, not endured a major conference. Here are some highlights. Everything went great. I'm ready to be home, but strangely energized. Perhaps it was all of the parlor games.

I took this picture on a bridge, at night.

This AWP, by far, had the finest Parlor Games of any AWP.

There is some very good food in Denver. I even ate the head off the cherub behind me.

In a taxi with Oliver (aren't you jealous, Gallaher?) on the way to the UA Press + CSU Poetry Center offsite, which many people told me was the best reading ever.

You wouldn't know it from this picture of me with Michael, but everything at the offiste reading went according to plan. All of the poets were on time! Everyone read for six minutes! It was amazing. Thanks to all who read, and attended.

No highlights would be complete without pictures of the tables.

NEOMFA TABLE

UA PRESS TABLE

BARN OWL REVIEW TABLE, HOME OF THE OWL EX MACHINA

We did a really cool panel with the amazing Erika Meitner, featured below dazzling the crowd (we actually had one!) with her power point.

As mentioned above, our return travels were dreadful, with a 6+ hour unexpected layover in Hotlanta, but we survived. The good vibe has even made that fiasco seem like a fond memory (almost).

I will hopefully write more soon about all of the awesome people I got to meet, and tell you the story of how I mustered up the courage to ask Rachel Dacus to blurb Saint Monica (she said yes! so excited!). Right now I need to get ready to teach my night class. I annotated all of my poems on the plane, including one during a rather bumpy landing. Dedication: I has it. AWP 10, you were pretty damn cool.

I live in glorious Akron, Ohio, where I write poems, edit the Akron Series in Poetry, and teach literature and creative writing. I am the author of five full-length collections of poems, including A Sunny Place with Adequate Water, Small Enterprise, and the collaborative poetry collection The Czar, with Jay Robinson (all from Black Lawrence Press). I've received an NEA fellowship in poetry, and several individual excellence awards from the Ohio Arts Council. In 2019 my first collection of prose poems, Partial Genius, is due to drop from BLP.
In my spare time, I like to photograph garbage.